Simple quantitative analytical methods for the determination of alkaloids from medicinal and edible plant foods using a homemade chromatographic monolithic column.

A polymer-based chromatographic monolithic column was prepared via in-situ radical polymerization using tetrahydrofurfuryl methacrylate as the monomer. The homemade column was used for the separation and quantitative analysis of alkaloids, including piperine from Piper longum (fruit of Piper longum Linn.) and pepper (fruit of Piper nigrum L.), hydroxy-α-sanshool, and hydroxy-γ-sanshool from zanthoxylum (fruit of Zanthoxylum bungeanum Maxim), as well as caffeine from Wuyi rock tea. The chromatographic fractions were identified by mass spectrometry. Single factor test and orthogonal test were both carried out to optimize the extraction conditions. The method validation indicated that the accuracy represented by spiked recovery ranged in 98.89%-102.06%, the correlation coefficients in 0.99986-0.99999. These results show that the prepared monolithic column can be successfully used to quantitatively analyse alkaloids from the real medicinal and edible plant foods with reversed-phase mechanism, which can avoid the long analytical time using traditional packed C18 column. The present method is a simple, and inexpensive method for quantitatively analysing alkaloids from medicinal and edible plant foods, exhibiting good specificity and durability.